Brooke, Rupert, 1887-1915

Poet and British naval officer.

English poet.

Rupert Brooke was a British Georgian poet, a privileged, intelligent, handsome youth, and his verse has come to represent the prevailing mood of England prior to World War I. Both he and his poetry were extremely popular in their day, but later reassessment has found the poems to be naive and sentimental. His untimely death during World War I provoked national mourning, and, although critical reaction remains divided, his verse is lyrically charming and instinctively patriotic.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), educated at Rugby School and King's College, Cambridge, was a member of the Georgian Poets. His most famous work, the sonnet sequence 1914 and Other Poems, appeared in 1915. Brooke joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in August 1914; he died of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite on a French hospital ship on his way to Gallipoli.

Rupert Brooke was an English poet, playwright, and essayist.

Rupert Brooke was educated at Rugby, where his father was master for many years and where he became friends with Geoffrey Keynes. He matriculated at King's College, Cambridge in 1906 as a classics scholar, though he was later to concentrate on English. In 1909, having completed the first part of the Classical Tripos, he moved to Grantchester where he would become the centre of a group known as the 'neo-pagans' and began to write the poetry for which he would become famous. In the same year he won the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship and in 1910 the Harness Prize. He was elected a fellow of King's College in 1913.

Personal problems prompted Brooke to take a long holiday, despite his recent election to a fellowship, and he spent a year traveling in America, Canada and the Pacific, along the way writing a series of articles for the Westminster Gazette. He returned in June 1914 and soon received a commission as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division. Thereafter he served at Antwerp, trained for a winter at Blandford Camp and then joined the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in February of 1915. He died on the following 23 April and was buried at Skyros, the victim in succession of sunstroke and blood poisoning.